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Are You a Visionary Leader?

Few people aspire to win the Olympics, invent a breakthrough product, or truly make a legacy difference in the world. But as a leader, it is your job to identify what the real possibility is in your market, and then mobilize your people and organization to achieve that possibility. Visionary leaders inspire the passion and capability of their people to achieve breakthrough results. This starts with clarifying your vision.

Achieving Breakthrough Requires Transformation in Four Key Areas

The Post-Visioning, Get Real Conversation

If you ask any CEO or senior executive of an organization if they have a company vision, they will say yes. If you ask most employees if their company has a vision, they will also say yes. In this day and age, everyone has a vision, but most are little more than posters on a wall.

Self-Mastery: The Foundation of Co-Creating and Great Transformational Leadership

Great transformational leaders see the big picture and the relationships between market, organizational, human, and cultural dynamics. They can see the roadmap for solving complex challenges that create new possibilities.

The journey of organizational change – especially transformation – is anything but a straight line. If you are making changes that are transformational, it is likely things will be unruly, unpredictable, and messy in the process. Because of this uncertainty, the best course of action is to plan your change and future state as best you can, and then establish a mechanism and process to course correct your plans and outcomes as you discover the need to do so. Transformational leadership is not about sticking to the rigid intention of “make the Plan; follow the Plan!”

Why Transformational Change Is So Uncertain

Transformational change is full of uncertainty because:

The organization begins its change process before the future state solution is known. The change process is designed to discover the best desired state with the input of experts and stakeholders who have insight into what is needed and will work.

Proceeding without a well-defined destination requires heading into the unknown, which makes most people uncomfortable. You will be letting people know that their world will be changing, but not giving them a clear idea of what it is changing into, or what will be required of them. Inevitably, people will feel insecure, and resistance may rise. In the face of this uncertainty, their commitment to change and performance levels become unpredictable, so the need to deal with these human dynamics becomes critical. No matter how much you plan, these human reactions will occur and require adjustments to your change plan.

Until you clarify your future state design, there is no way of knowing in advance the pace or actual scope of work that will be required, which will undoubtedly grow as you proceed.

This model portrays the journey of transformation. This dynamic process cannot be effectively managed by project management where the tools and steps are too rigid as the backbone for guiding an emergent transformational change process.

Like in sailing, the transformational path is not a straight line between the current reality and your vision of the future state. It makes innumerable turns as leaders monitor what is known, what is emerging, and what the best outcome and path should be.

Be clear on your intended direction, and then give up any expectation of controlling the change process or pressuring it into a pre-determined timeline or scope.

Actively pursue information and feedback that help you discover the need to alter your desired outcome or course of action.

Optimize your ability to learn from the feedback you gather and turn that learning into appropriate, rapid course corrections. Learning and course correcting are essential for transformational success.

Making Learning and Course Correcting a Reality

Most of us tend to see deviation from our change plan as a problem. In organizational transformation, deviation is never the problem. The issue is always how quickly we can spot a need to course correct, then learn from the situation and change course. The better and faster your organization is at learning and course correcting – as individuals, teams, and a whole system – the smaller (and less costly) the adjustments need to be. Think agile! Promote “Getting Smarter by the Day!”

Developing expertise at learning and course correcting requires a significant change of mindset for most leaders and employees, which must be supported by appropriate shifts in cultural norms that inhibit it. In many organizations, the messengers of “bad news” get criticized. Making a mistake is detrimental to a person’s career. These cultural norms stand directly in the way of succeeding in transformation. To increase your organization’s change capability, you must build a culture where people are not blamed for making or surfacing “mistakes” but are held accountable for learning from and fixing them.

Consider these cultural norms. If they are present in your organization, they will inhibit your ability to succeed, at least in a timely way.

Barriers to sharing information across functional, process, or geographic boundaries

Too little access by change leaders to executives after the project has been launched

No formal process for “stopping the train” and quickly calling decision makers together to evaluate emerging data that suggests a course change is needed

Tying compensation or recognition to change projects getting implemented by a certain date rather than to the outcomes they produce

Changing these cultural norms is not an overnight affair. People need to re-learn (and trust) that they will be treated differently for surfacing indicators of potential course corrections. They need to be invited to speak up, and be given respectful and adequate attention when they do. You do not automatically need to make every adjustment offered, but you would be smart to consider the value of each. Learning and course correcting requires setting the expectation for it from all levels of the organization. It is supported by putting in place the systems and processes that enable it. This requires either establishing new systems or modifying existing ones. The best place to start this shift is to call attention to the need to do things differently on behalf of a successful transformation, and then YOU be the first to overtly model the need for learning and course correction!

We guide visionary leaders to transform themselves and their organizations to Achieve Breakthrough in business results, culture, leadership, and executive team performance, while building world-class change leadership capability. We are pioneers teaching Conscious Change Leadership, and provide a complete System of Transformation to our executive clients.
We are not your typical consultants. Since our beginning,
our primary business strategy has been to walk our own talk—to
learn, grow, transform, and breakthrough to ever-increasing heights
in who we are as people and what we can do as professionals. We
strive every day to become models of the best humans we can
become, while delivering the most innovative and impactful
transformational solutions. While we don’t always achieve these
goals, they are forever our intent and practice.